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Notes from Drupal 8 status update talk

Fri, 10/28/2011 - 13:36 -- webchick

Here are some notes from the Drupal 8 status update talk that Dries and I gave today to the Acquia team, since this seemed like useful info for the community to know as well. :) It covers both process changes for addressing previous issues that arose in Drupal 7, as well as a status update on Drupal 8 progress to-date. This could be useful to folks who have been wondering where all of the various Drupal 8 status updates fit into the "bigger" picture.

Please comment here if I left anything out, or messed up anything.

Background of D7 challenges and how we’re addressing these in D8

Two core maintainers overseeing entirety of Drupal core doesn’t scale; appointed “initiative owners” to take on strategic aspects of development.

Bi-weekly “scrum of scrum” calls with initiative leads to get them unblocked.

Config: Developed architecture that allows for saving buttons in the admin interface to automatically generate XML files holding configuration data. These can then be moved around with version control. The system intends to replace variable_get/set as well as import/export functionality in Views, Image Styles, etc.

In many ways a “glue” initiative to tie together elements of WSCCI, Design, and HTML 5. Covers things like responsive/mobile-friendly conversion of core themes, a solution for dynamic image resizing, and front-end performance

Goal: Make Drupal the “go to” CMS platform for mobile. YEAH!

Other initiatives identified by survey, yet to be announced

WYSIWYG

Usability/ease of use

Media/asset management

“Better APIs”

Content import/export & Content staging

Both part of CMI

Non-initiative progress

PHP 5.3 as a baseline, allows for better support for OO, namespaces, and other cool stuff.

There's already rdf output support in Drupal 7 core, did you miss that or are you thinking about something else? Note that just because something isn't listed here doesn't mean it won't happen, but it needs people to work on it.

Thanks for insightful updates, it gives lot's of hope that D8 will finally go the right direction. Better API, HTML/CSS are getting polished, the core framework will get less complex and lighter. I wished the Theming layer and API's will get easier to adopt and learn for front-end devs coming from other CMS communities, attracting more and more end-users to favor Drupal.